Fall festival season is heating up and TIFF is the latest event to bring countless amazing new movies our way. The Toronto International Film Festival wrapped up this past weekend, and Cord Jefferson’s feature directorial debut American Fiction walked away with the prestigious People’s Choice Award.
Voted by the public attending the screenings at TIFF, the People’s Choice Award is regarded as the starting gun of the Academy Award nominations race. Many of the previous winners went on to get nominations and even won the best picture Oscar, including Nomadland, Green Book, and 12 Years a Slave.
Time will tell if American Fiction will experience the same fate, but its success in Toronto is quite impressive regardless. It hails from the first-time feature director Cord Jefferson, who based this film on Percival Everett’s novel Erasure.
“My gratitude towards everyone who watched American Fiction [and] discussed it afterwards among friends and colleagues is endless. The film is now in your hands, and I’m so grateful that it was embraced in this way,” Jefferson said in a statement.
The festival’s opening film, Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, was one of the two runners-up for the People’s Choice Award this year, along with Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers.
